Abstract

Nothing vivifies the First Noble Truth of Buddhism—dukkha, suffering, the impossibility of satisfaction—like the act of writing. Recently I sat in a coffee shop and rewrote a single sentence for nearly an hour. The argument refused to advance. Words bounced against my skull. I just knew my efforts dishonored the material. Nothing worked. And then the mountain spoke. Ten minutes later I was hiking up Evey Canyon in the foothills of Mount Baldy in Southern California. Among the old-growth oaks, beside a spring-fed stream, the noisy concepts in my head dropped away. I returned to my body: footsteps, breath, sunlight on skin, vivid blue sky, scent of sage, croaking of ravens. Anxi- ety evaporated. I became present to the world. To walk this path again in memory risks entering deceptive territory. It is difficult, if not risky, to reflect critically on one's own spiritual experience, and Belden Lane has noted that an author's self-disclosure creates significant challenges for scholarship in Christian spirituality and those who write it. 1 Yet, Buddhist practice demands examination of personal experience. Buddhist thought discourages conceptual analysis or evaluation of the experiences of others, even under the guise of "critical distance." So to protect myself and others, I am adopting here the method of critical interiority, something Mary Frohlich describes as "critical self-presence," 2 a knowing-what-you-do-as- you-do-it. In this effort I am assisted by the practice of vipassana or insight meditation, the core discipline of Theravada Buddhism, which I have engaged for nearly thirty years. Vipassana hones non-interpretive awareness of subtle, ever-changing movements of the body, thoughts, sensations, and consciousness. Critical self-presence may be especially crucial when it comes to pars- ing an experience of religious multiplicity 3 (that is, claiming or being claimed by multiple religious or spiritual traditions at once). 4 I think of myself, and in some public contexts I identify, as Buddhist-Christian. I do not intend to provide an account of how and why I came to a complex religious identity; the process was, and is, complex, multifaceted, intimate, and risky. I will simply say that I was drawn to Buddhist teaching and meditation as a young adult who yearned for apophatic spirituality. A long association with a Vietnamese- American monk (with whom I share a guru-chela relationship) and the prac-